Vincent Ford

Vincent Ford (c. 1940 – 28 December 2008), known as "Tata", was a Jamaicansongwriter best known for receiving writing credit for "No Woman, No Cry", the reggae song made famous by Bob Marley & The Wailers, as well as three other Bob Marley songs. However, controversy persisted as to whether the compositions had actually been written by Marley himself, and had been credited to Ford to allow Marley to avoid contractual obligations, resulting in a legal battle that ended with the Marley estate being granted control of the songs.[1]

Vincent Ford was born around 1940. He used a wheelchair, having lost his legs due to diabetes. Despite his disability, he was still able to save another youth from drowning when he was a teenager.[1] He ran a soup kitchen in Trenchtown.[1]

Marley had not wanted his new songs to be associated with Cayman and it had been speculated, including in his obituary in The Independent, that he had put them in the names of his close friends and family members as a means of avoiding the contractual restrictions and as a way to "provide lasting help to family and close friends".[2]

Marley's widow and his former manager Danny Sims sued to obtain royalty and ownership rights to the songs, claiming that Marley had actually written the songs but had assigned the credit to Ford to avoid meeting commitments made in prior contracts. A 1987 court decision sided with the Marley estate, which assumed full control of the songs.[1]

While in Trenchtown in the late 1970s, Marley biographer Vivien Goldman asked Ford point-blank "Was it you?" who wrote the songs. Ford never responded to the question directly, answering "Well, what do you think?". Goldman described Ford as "an unbroken link to a generation, many of whom are now gone", reminiscing that "The last time I saw him he was going into a Marley family gig in Kingston, and he was just borne along on a wave of youth, all admiring him and understanding what he’d come to represent." Given the collaborative nature of reggae, Goldman described how "That song may very well have been a conversation that they had sitting around one night. That's the way Bob's creativity worked. In the end it didn't matter. The point is Bob wanted him to have the money."[1]